Sunday, September 25, 2016

The idea that people gain happiness by acting in accordance
with their perceived identity has interested me since I read (and wrote about) Identity Economics, by George
Akerlof and Rachel Kranton quite a few years ago. The idea was used in their
book to consider the incentives that people have to conform to the norms and
ideals of the social categories to which they belong (e.g. gender, race, social
class, age group) but I wonder whether the idea of being true to one’s self
might shed light on the relationship between happiness and deeper concepts of
identity related to personality, signature strengths and values.

A search of the relevant literature in psychology has not
uncovered any direct tests of this idea, but I have found a couple of articles
that seem to point in the direction of a hypothesis that might be worth
testing.

My starting point is that the extent to which people assess
their lives as being meaningful seems to be closely related to their perceptions
of their identity. We know from research by Roy Baumeister (with Kathleen Vohs,
Jennifer Aaker and Emily Garbinsky) that the extent to which people view their
lives as meaningful is closely related to doing things that express themselves
(for a summary discussion see Baumeister’s essay entitled The Meanings of Life).

The research by Baumeister et al was focussed on the
differences between happiness and meaningfulness of life as assessed by the
individuals in their survey. The two states overlapped substantially: almost
half of the variation in meaningfulness was explained by happiness, and vice
versa. The researchers used statistical techniques to abstract from this
interdependence and to look for factors that had different impacts on happiness
and meaning.

The research suggested that the extent to which people
identify as being wise or creative was associated with them viewing their lives
as meaningful, but did not make them happier. Other factors adding to
meaningfulness but not happiness included working, exercising, meditating and
praying. Stress, negative events, worrying, arguing, and reflecting on
challenges and struggles all seem to be part and parcel of a highly meaningful
life.

Factors that added to happiness that had little impact on meaningfulness
of life included satisfaction of desires, having enough money to buy the things
one wants, good health, and the frequency of good and bad feelings. There is a
trade-off between happiness and meaningfulness of life because people have to
choose at the margin whether to allocate more time and other resources to the
things that make them happier or to things that make life more meaningful.

Unfortunately, the research I have been discussing did not
consider to what extent people perceive themselves as actually acting in
accordance with the values that add meaning to their lives. It might be
possible for some individuals to feel that their lives are highly meaningful
but to be unhappy because they lack the self-control to live up to the high
standards that they set themselves. Alternatively, greater self-control may
make it possible for people to attain more meaningful lives through a smaller
sacrifice of happiness.

There is some research which shows that inadequate
self-control has a deleterious effect on happiness. Psychologists define self-control
as the ability to override or change one’s inner responses as well as to
interrupt undesired impulses and to refrain from acting on them. An article entitled “Yes, But Are They Happy?
Effects of Trait Self-Control on Affective Well-Being and Life Satisfaction” by
Wilhelm Hofmann, Maike Luhmann, Rachel Fisher, Kathleen Vohs and Roy Baumeister
concluded: “our data clearly indicate that people who have more trait self-control
feel happier and are gladder about their life”.
The authors found that “many benefits of high self-control are linked to
handling and avoiding conflicts among goals”.

Adding all that together suggests to me that it might be reasonable to hypothesize
that an individual’s happiness depends on: (1) the extent to which they
perceive their life to be meaningful (this variable accounts for factors that
jointly influence the meaningfulness of life and happiness); (2) factors that
add to happiness that have little direct impact on meaningfulness of life; (3) self-control.

That relationship could be turned around the other way to view
meaningfulness of life as a function of happiness and the other two variables (with
opposite signs expected for the estimated coefficients expected for those
variables).

The important point is that there may be potential for many people to
flourish to a greater extent by improving their self-control. Roy Baumeister
and Ron Tierney wrote a book about how to do that, which was discussed on this blog a few years ago.

Postscript:

After writing this piece I had some doubts about whether it
makes sense to suggest that people with self-control problems would claim that
their lives are meaningful. Then it occurred to me that just about everyone I
know is a reforming sinner – a fallible human trying to live a better life. I
don’t know many saints!

Introspection can’t take me far, but it does tell me that sinners
who try to reform themselves often do so because they feel their lives are
meaningful and should not be wasted. Introspection also tells me that reforming
sinners cannot live with no regrets unless they are willing to expose
themselves to temptation, and that when people are tempted they find themselves
outside their comfort zones - they tend to succumb to temptation from time to
time and feel somewhat unhappy.

For example, while I was giving up smoking I would have
certainly said that my life was highly meaningful. However, in order to live a
normal life I had to expose myself to situations where I was tempted to have a
cigarette. So, I spent a fair amount of time suffering from withdrawal symptoms
and would probably have rated my happiness somewhat lower than when I was
smoking full-time.

That story has a happy ending. For many years I have been
able to observe other people smoking without craving for a cigarette. I would now give myself a higher rating for self-control, but I’m
still a fallible human trying to live a better life!

Sunday, September 18, 2016

It is now
about 18 years since Virginia Postrel suggested in The Future and Its Enemiesthat our political, intellectual and
cultural landscape was increasingly being defined by “stasis” and “dynamism”:

“How we feel
about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a
civilization: Do we search for stasis
– a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism – a world of constant creation, discovery, and
competition?”

The author
was writing about the United States, but the ideas in her book have much wider
application. The old political divisions seem to breaking down all over the
world. On many issues there is not much political distance between social
reactionaries, green reactionaries and technocrats. The social reactionaries
yearn for the kind of world our parents lived in, green reactionaries yearn for
a premodern society and technocrats fear change that is not managed by
governments. They all see virtue in government regulation of innovation. As a
result, we see strange alliances forming on issues such as fracking.

By contrast,
dynamists share beliefs in a spontaneous order. They emphasize individual
flourishing and individual responsibility, and the possibilities for progress
that emerge when people are free to experiment and learn. They care about
“protecting the processes that allow an open-ended future to unfold”.

Virginia
suggested that dynamists don’t yet share a political identity. She notes that
they may view themselves as libertarian, progressive, liberal or conservative. That
still seems to be true. Many dynamists eschew politics. Of those who take an
interest in politics, people who see themselves as libertarians or classical
liberals would have least objection to being labelled as dynamists - if they
understand what the label is intended to mean.

Misunderstanding
of the meaning of ‘dynamist’ might be a problem. To the uninitiated, the word
could appear to refer to history’s hastening agents who seek to activate what
they perceive as ‘historical forces’ to achieve a particular vision of future society.
I can’t think of a positive word that adequately captures the idea of allowing
an open-ended future to emerge. A new word might be required: e.g. ‘catallaxist’
- a believer in catallaxy, or spontaneous order.

Advances in technology
have helped those who believe in spontaneous order to achieve some important
victories over the last 18 years. For example, the emergence of services such
as Uber are helping to break down regulation protecting incumbent service
providers.

Yet, on
balance, it looks to me as though the stasists have been winning the economic
policy debate. In the aftermath of the GFC, deregulation has often been
perceived as a cause of economic crisis, overlooking the effects of the
regulatory environment in encouraging some financial institutions to believe
that they were too big to be allowed to fail. The actions of some leaders of
the economics profession in distancing themselves from market liberalisation
policies has lent weight to populist demands for a return of stasist policy
prescriptions.

As I see it,
identifying myself as a believer in spontaneous order does not involve an
ideological commitment never to advocate government intervention under any
circumstances. It has to do with where the onus of proof should lie. In the
case of migration, for example, I would argue that the onus should be on those
favouring restrictions on international movement of people to justify why such restrictions
should exist. It is argued that free international movement of people is incompatible
with welfare systems in which immigrants can qualify for social assistance, but
it is not obvious why immigrants should qualify for social assistance. A more persuasive argument immigration
restrictions can possibly be mounted in terms of potentially adverse social
consequences of a large influx of migrants with different cultural traditions.

Similar
considerations apply in relation to new technology. It is easy to mount a
persuasive argument for regulatory restrictions on access to nuclear technology,
but that is obviously an extreme example. Some statists have argued that innovations
in home entertainment should be regulated to avoid adverse social impacts, but they
imply that individuals are not capable of learning how to make sensible
decisions for themselves and their families about use of new technology. Some
of us had difficulty in making good decisions about use of our leisure time
following the introduction of television, but that is not a powerful argument
for the government to make such decisions for us. Of course, as suggested by Daniel Lattier, we have a responsibility to learn to use technology wisely,
i.e., temperately. Similar considerations have applied in many aspects of life,
e.g. food, beverages, sex, since ancient times.

How should
we view decisions about whether to enhance brain power with neural lace? I
ended a recent post on this topic suggesting that neural lace will not be worth
having unless it can be developed in such a way as to enable humans to protect
the privacy, autonomy and responsibility that is integral to their individual
flourishing. I should have added that the decision to have a neural lace
implant will be best left for individuals to make for themselves. Anyone wants
to argue that choosing to use some particular form of neural lace would be tantamount
to selling oneself into slavery, is of course free to try to make a case for
regulation or prohibition.

My reading
about potential consequences of artificial intelligence (see blog posts here
and here) has left me feeling somewhat more cautious about new technology, but that
does not mean that stasis now makes more sense than dynamism. Virginia makes some
relevant points. She acknowledges: “the open-ended future can be genuinely
scary, the turmoil it creates genuinely painful”. However, she follows with the
observation:

“Statist
prescriptions … stifle the very processes through which people improve their
lives – from the invention of new medical treatments to the creation of art. In
their quest for stability, statists make society brittle, vulnerable to all
sorts of disasters”.

Like other
technological innovations, the advent of super-intelligent machines has
potential to expand the possibilities for human flourishing. It will also
expand the range of technology by which the flourishing of individual humans
could be threatened by other entities, including governments. New technology will not alter the fundamental principle
of liberalism and that adult individuals should be free to flourish as they
choose, provided they do not interfere with the rights of others.

Sunday, September 4, 2016

In case some of my friends and relatives think that I have
chosen this question just to provoke them, I should note at the outset that the
entrepreneurial qualities I have in mind don’t necessarily involve a desire to
obtain great wealth. Ordinary people often, and increasingly,
benefit from such qualities in their search for rewarding employment.

When I was young it seemed possible for most people in
relatively high income countries to choose a career suited to their personal
abilities and inclinations, obtain the qualifications necessary to pursue that
career and then look forward to working in the same occupation until their
retirement. It seemed possible for people to plan their lives around stable
career paths, in order to obtain the optimal combination of income, interesting
work, job security, or whatever else they were seeking. Educational
opportunities depended to a larger extent on wealth and/or ability, and career
opportunities for women were more restricted that at present. Nevertheless, everyone
who applied themselves diligently was predicted to end up having a successful
career.

From an individual's perspective, such predictions were always problematic.
For one reason or another, some people were more successful than predicted. Others made mistakes in their career choices and
either changed paths, or came to perceive themselves as square pegs trying to
fit into round holes. There was always a lot of adjustment going on in the
labour market as people moved between firms and industries in search of better
opportunities, or as a result of retrenchments. Most people ended up with
satisfying careers, but some didn’t.

These days there is much greater uncertainty about whether
young people will be able to pursue the careers they prepare for, even though
educational opportunities are more widely available. Predictions can be made
about the kinds of skills that are likely to be in demand in future (see, for
example a post I wrote last year on this question) but we cannot be confident
that any particular academic pursuits (including STEM subjects) will
necessarily produce the skills that potential employers might want. Acquiring useful skills and obtaining rewarding
employment seems to be becoming more akin to an entrepreneurial process of discovering
and gearing up to supply a market niche.

In thinking about the process of skill acquisition and job
search it may be helpful to reflect upon Israel Kirzner’s view of the way entrepreneurial
decision-making differs from economizing decision-making i.e. efficient use of
known means to achieve known ends. Kirzner notes that entrepreneurial
decision-making requires a posture of alertness:

‘In addition to the exploitation of perceived opportunities,
purposive human action involves a posture of alertness toward the discovery of
as yet unperceived opportunities and
their exploitation. This element in human action – the alertness toward new
valuations with respect to ends, new availability of means – may be termed the entrepreneurial element in the
individual decision’ (Perception,Opportunity and Profit,p 109).

Of course, occupations are just one aspect of life. How does
the forgoing discussion relate to the question I asked at the outset was about human
flourishing? Is it reasonable to argue that the entrepreneurial alertness
discussed by Kirzner is an important component of the practical wisdom required
for individual human flourishing?

In my view, Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen make a
strong case for that in their recently book, The Perfectionist Turn, aspects of which have been briefly
discussed in the last two posts on this blog (here and here). After
acknowledging Kirzner’s insights, the authors suggest that just as
entrepreneurship involves a discovery process, so too does human flourishing.
This is contrary to the view of people who imply that pursuit of our final end
in life is merely an optimisation process:

‘Knowing what our end is, so it is said, will leave us only
the task of utilizing the means at our disposal to effectively achieve that end.
Yet, as we have tried to show in our various discussions of freedom and
self-direction, our end of a perfecting or flourishing life is not like one of
using known resources in their most effective manner. Rather the perfecting is
more like discovering means available to such an end that are as yet unknown,
or only partly known, to us. Moreover, once those means are discovered, it is
equally mistaken to suppose that efficient usage is the only remaining
challenge. Because perfecting or flourishing is not a passive state but an
activity, there is virtually a constant reassessment of the adequacy and
appropriateness of the means; this, as a consequence, suggests openness and
alertness to new opportunities amidst changing circumstances. Finally,
optimization suggests efficiency along only one dimension, but flourishing (at
least in our view) is inclusive of multiple dimensions’ (p 287-8).

While such observations about the qualities required for individual
human flourishing would probably have been as relevant in ancient Greece as
they are today, we are helped to comprehend them by a sympathetic understanding
of the qualities required for successful entrepreneurship.

Emancipation

Welcome!

Welcome to Freedom and Flourishing. While you are here, why not take a look around and leave some comments.

There is a list of my most popular posts below. I am pleased that a post about characteristics of a good society, that I wrote in 2009, is still one of the most popular. That post captures some of the ideas about freedom and individual human flourishing that I think are most important.